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Are We Poor?

How poor are we, as Americans? There are all sorts of ways to measure the poverty of our lives: income, possessions, health, houses, even height. Depending on one’s personality and position, there is also the matter of whether others around us are richer. The federal government does have a fixed one—a poverty line—and Tuesday we found out that forty-six million two hundred thousand Americans are, by that standard, poor, which is 2.6 million more than just two years ago. The poverty line is notched at $22,113 in income for a family of four. That is not very much, and buys even less in some parts of the country than in others. (John Cassidy explains just how bad the numbers are.)

And who are the poor? Disproportionately, they are children: twenty-two per cent of American children live below the poverty line. Does having children make parents poor? Would the balance be different, though the children no less deprived, if Social Security really were dismantled, and their grandparents were poor, too? Those are interesting questions, and there are many more—including the large one of what and who we hope these children will become—but first we have to recognize that we are dealing with a slow-moving crisis that will take a generation to unfold. In 1934, at the depths of the Depression, Eleanor Roosevelt, discussing the number of teen-agers whose parents couldn’t afford to keep them in high school, said that she had “moments of real terror when I think we might be losing this generation.” This isn’t 1934, of course, and the new numbers, bleak as they are, are not what they were then. But Roosevelt’s emotion is appropriate, especially at a time when her husband’s legacy is under such assault: these statistics should terrify us. They are an outline of a future that we ought to begin redrawing while we can.

So what next? The Census Bureau found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the lack of jobs was a driver of poverty. As John Cassidy wrote in Comment this week, the President’s job’s bill could be a real start—if he can get it through Congress. That will take his will, and not just the Republicans’ forbearance. We also need to think about taxes, and our mutual obligations, and what we are willing to invest. (One wonders if Elizabeth Warren’s campaign for Senate in Massachusetts, announced today, will find a way to articulate some of these themes.) One in every six Americans is now poor—really poor, not just in the lowest percentile relatively. No matter how rich the richest of us are, we are all the poorer for that.

Eleanor Roosevelt at a Works Progress Administration nursery school in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1936. Photograph: the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library & Museum.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.